Word: claptrap
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Nineteen years ago, in a thundering book called Universities: American, English, German, learned Abraham Flexner, then director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N J., roundly damned U.S. colleges. With all their "wretched claptrap" of vocationalism, he held, "they resemble the modern drugstore in which the pharmacy has been pushed in the corner by soda fountains." Last week, at 82, Educator Flexner announced a modified opinion: "There must have been changes in educational methods." His reason for thinking so: for two years he had quietly been taking courses in English literature and the fine arts at Columbia...
...conversion to Roman Catholicism, in Seven Storey Mountain. And, in a category all its own, there was Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a continuing bestseller in spite of its statistical dullness, and gave rise to more bad jokes and pseudoscientific claptrap than any book in recent years...
...tradition. Everybody quoted him as saying that he was "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion." That would have sounded less smug if they had added, as Eliot did: "I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to claptrap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than claptrap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define." Years later he regretted that he had given "some critics the impression that...
Shakespeare's Macbeth is a turbulent melodrama, full of spooky claptrap, but its central figure gives it the dignity of classic tragedy. Welles has kept the claptrap, but his Macbeth is no once-honorable soldier whose muddled aspirations trap him into a crime against himself (the murder of King Duncan, in the play, also destroys the murderer's ability to live with himself). Orson has robbed the play of tragic impact by substituting a conniving heel who kills as he climbs...
...five, the title poem of this book, is mainly a befuddled piece of pseudo-Stoic claptrap, to be read in sorrow by all who admire the author. Its burden is that God and King are gone, even Man is a little shopworn, but the "human perishable heart" remains as the hero of the future, since there...